SOURCE: Osachoff, Margaret Gail. “The Bearness of Bear.” University of Windsor Review 15, nos. 1-2 (1979-1980): 13-21.

In the following essay, Osachoff finds the figure of the bear in Engel's novel to be a warning against romanticizing nature.

Bear, by Marian Engel, has been taken as the perfect example of a modern pastoral idyll of the primitive type.¹ Lou, the heroine, leaves a dull job and loveless sex with her boss in the city and goes to northern Ontario for the summer in search of a new identity. After experiencing love for a bear, she returns “clean and simple and proud,”² reborn or revitalized and ready to start a new life in the city. On a symbolic level the bear can be seen as the embodiment of Lou's repressed passion, her atrophied instinctual life, the world of nature from which she has cut herself off. After all, “passion is...